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Take The Pain Out Of Business Travel. Fly Yourself.

Don’t discount a small plane as a powerful business tool. For trips under 600-800 miles, it can beat airline times by a huge margin; and on 100-200 mile flights, you’ll be in close competition with corporate jets for performance and a big winner on efficiency.

When a client in Teterboro, NJ—a stone’s throw from Manhattan—called and asked to meet the next morning, I had a few choices.

Traveling from Providence, RI, by road was particularly unappealing. That’s a four-hour trek down Interstate 95 where construction and traffic delays for at least a third of the route are a given. And then there was the dismal prospect of frazzled, grouchy New York drivers battling for rush-hour lane supremacy on the maze of highways across the New York area. Forget that.

Time To Spare, Go By Air

Sure, Providence airport is 15 minutes away. Delta has a $2,000 (are they kidding) round-trip fare to Newark that takes six hours (!) each way. That’s without the 90 minute pre-departure clear-security-get-to the-gate time penalty. You could fly to Bora Bora for less money.

Ok, let’s be fair: Hot Wire found a nonstop United commuter flight. While the one hour and seven minute schedule sounded attractive, it still meant arriving 90 minutes prior to departure time, plus another half-hour road trip to Teterboro. Door-to-door, my car was faster. The real clincher was the next-day, round-trip $1,000 fare! It was certainly half-price but, no thank you.

Ah ha! North Central Airport, 15 minutes to the north, is where I keep my Mooney. Let’s see. Leave home at 8 am, takeoff by 9 am and arrive at 10 am. No contest!

Cleared For Takeoff

On a short hop like this, I’ll travel at 220 mph and get better gas mileage than a Hummer—20 gallons each way. It was summer so the only weather that would deter me would be fog (none), and thunderstorms (none). Still, I filed IFR (instrument flight rules), which put me in the air traffic system along my route together with other small-piston-powered aircraft like mine, corporate jets, commuter turboprops and of course major airlines—but not the Delta flight that was heading to Atlanta before returning to Newark.

My routing was more or less a straight line to Teterboro. Cleared at 6,000 feet, I knew the corporate jets and airliners would be well above me. That was indeed the case. Although air traffic control (ATC) keeps every IFR aircraft separated by a healthy margin, one needs to keep a watchful eye. Still, on the entire flight through the heavily trafficked areas between Boston, Providence, Hartford and New York, aided by my panel instrument that shows air traffic, I saw only one other plane and that was an airliner in the New York area. There was nothing even remotely nearby, and in the busy Teterboro area where ATC vectors everyone in a safe and efficient conga line to avoid Newark traffic, the flight was equally routine. The nearest plane was a Falcon Jet five miles behind me.

Advanced Technology = Safety And Efficiency

Mooney’s, and the new crop of small planes like the Cirrus and the Cessna Covalis TT, can fly approaches to nearly match the speed of corporate jets, so spacing is rarely an issue. In addition, the latest crop of light, piston-powered aircraft are better equipped than many airliners five years ago. Even my 20-year old Mooney, which is retrofitted with moving map displays (three) that show weather, traffic plus approach charts, makes a 10-year old Boeing look like a dinosaur. My autopilot will fly the latest GPS approaches to the same minimum altitudes as any airliner or corporate jet and when I land, a large image of the airport taxiways displays so that I know exactly where I am.

After landing, I taxied up to one of several facilities at Teterboro dedicated to business aircraft and was greeted with a smile and “how can we be of service.” I walked from my plane to the facility, out the lobby and to the office building nearby. Not only was I was early for my 10:30 meeting, it was great fun getting there, proving that business travel can not only be efficient, but also enjoyable.

The Right Tool For The Job

That’s the beauty of Teterboro and airports like it. Business aviation can use metropolitan area reliever airports like this. They surround every major city and they’re often closer to one’s ultimate destination (in my case across the street). In addition, many thousands of other airfields serve smaller cities, towns and local communities across the nation. So, Delta, United and American, while you give great service between New York and LA, you just don’t go where I and tens of thousands of business flyers need to go.

It’s amazing to realize how powerful a business tool even a small airplane can be. But whether you fly yourself or sit in the cabin of a much faster and capable business jet together with your colleagues, there is more to it than saving time and money. You can make travel a pleasure again—actually make it fun. How do you put a price tag on that?

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Sounds like a frustrating problem. Unfortunately, many employers have similar policies largely because they don’t understand the technological innovation, inherent safety and improved reliability in the current generation piston-powered aircraft. Take the Cirrus, for example, with its built-in parachute system that will gently lower the whole plane to a safe landing in a dire emergency.

How does that help you? The answer is simple, with a little interpretation. Years ago, Flying Magazine had a sage and cantankerous columnist with knife-edge wit named Gordon Baxter. “Bax,” as he was called, was entertaining a group of enthusiasts about the joy and pleasure of flying and airplane ownership when suddenly a hand in the audience shot up: “Bax, what do you do if your wife doesn’t like flying?” Bax pondered for a moment and replied, “My first wife didn’t like flying.”

Cirrus is great, no doubt, but it’s also significantly more expensive than author’s Mooney. Even the SR-20 model cannot be gotten below $100k. More modern SR-22 and SR-22T go all the way to half a million. One needs to be very peeved by airlines and TSA before he can consider a Cirrus.

I know a gentleman, based in upper Florida, who flies a Cirrus. He works for IBM and his typical trip is to their office in Houston. He is not a VP or Director, just a mid-level manager. However, he is single. I’m sure the airplane consumes a significant part of his discretionary income.

No question about it. Flying privately for business or personal reasons is costly. It will never compare to an airfare, but if you focus on cost, you miss a vital part of the equation – value — the value of time and the value of business, among other intangibles. These are essential to the cost/benefit analysis. To get a better picture, check out Forbes’ Time-Value Calculator at www.ForbesBusinessAviation.com as well as my earlier post.

Whether a utilizing a Mooney, Cirrus or a Learjet, Falcon Jet, Embraer or a $60,000 million Gulfstream, considering value vs. cost is key. There will be a post on this very soon, but as one company CEO said, “If you try to compare the cost of flying the company airplane with an airfare, and overnight expenses, it will never compute.”

Instead, he asks: What’s the value of getting to three meetings in a day (or even one) and back home at night with family versus a day or two or more on the road? What’s the value of the business that you can do if you go, or the value of business at risk if you don’t go? What’s the value of wear and tear – of arriving tired, worn out and grouchy — versus arriving refreshed and on top of your game? What’s the value of taking managers, consultants and clients to the same meeting and winning the business or confirming the investment feasibility on the spot? What’s the value getting four, six, or ten people to a site or a meeting and bringing them back the same day?

If cost was the sole criterion for travel decisions, everyone would be riding Greyhound

I agree Mark! Well said! Here At US Aviation in Denton Texas we handle all aspects of the business and pleasure pilots. We are seeing more and more small aircraft business flyers these days. Look us up at www.usaviation.aero Thanks again for a great report.

Thanks for pointing that out, Jeff. What you didn’t mention, though, was how well suited Denton is for serving the northern Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. With its 7,000 foot runway just 20 miles north of DFW, Denton provide business aviation with quick easy access to commercial parks and office complexes on the north side of Dallas.

In fact, 15 business aviation airports are within a 20-mile radius of Dallas. They offer a faster, more efficient way to reach any part of the metroplex than flying commercially to DFW.

Less traffic, fewer delays, fast access – what could be better? Whether flying in a small piston powered plane or a large business jet, or anything in between, airports like these allow amazing time saving on the ground as well as in the air.

Ideal! Hey Mark, don’t forget to remind everyone that it usually still works well if your destination is further than a walk from where you shut your airplane down. Most regional FBOs (including Teterboro) have rental cars available. Many also have courtesy cars; their use may have some restrictions, but generally they also are an option for shorter meetings.

Jim, you’re absolutely correct, and that will be the subject of another post.

Many of the 5,000 business aviation airports in the U.S. have facilities called FBOs (Fixed Based Operator, an archaic term for business/general aviation air terminal), which offer a wide range of services and amenities for business and personal flyers. Some have comfortable lounge areas for pilots and waiting passengers, Wi-Fi equipped conference rooms, snacks, co-located restaurants, flight crew nap rooms and a host of other features. Others are more basic — just refueling and flight-planning areas and a coffee brewer (not to be sampled at the end of the day!).

Almost all FBOs, however, have car rentals available or can arrange one locally, and in many cases, they will have a courtesy/crew car available or offer their own for short periods.

Mooney gets you there, but to extract business efficiency you need to rack hours. Otherwise it’s an asset that sits on your balance. You have to pay your insurance, you have to do your Annual Inspection. So you must fly all the time to make it worth your while, not only when Delta flies you to Atlanta between Providence and JFK.

Once you start doing that, the low dispatch reliability of a piston single is going to catch up with you. Weather is the main factor: you cannot fly when airliners continue to fly. Mechanical reliablity of a Mooney is also not like an airliner’s. Also, Delta can swap out a broken airplane, but you cannot swap out your Mooney if your vacuum pump fails.

A few missed business meetings may be enough to remove the luster of travelling by a personal airplane.

I happen to know a couple of people who do actually travel for work. One has a Bonanza and travels around Texas as a salesman for pharmaceuticals. So, it can be done. But should it be done? I think this article is somewhat too optimistic answering that!

Pete – I’ve been using my plane to attend business meetings for 4 years now and have never missed one. You are correct about weather, though, and one has to be prepared to drive or go commercial when needed. Fortunately, I live out West where the weather is nice 90% of the time (we mainly use our IFR licenses to get in and out of beach communities before the fog burns off). Also, 80% of the airports we fly into for business do not have little or no commercial airline service, so that leaves travel by car or flying into another city and then renting a car for driving to the destination. The truth is that we can cover vastly more territory in the plane than a car or commercial, and attend meetings in 3 different locations in a single day that would otherwise take 3 days. So, while you raise some legitimate points, the bottom line is that the time value of money and efficiencies of point-to-point GA make it the best investment you can make if you own a business which requires travel to diverse locations which are not readily served by commercial airlines.